Why your Pilates class is not strength training

Philip Pape 0:00

If you've been doing Pilates or yoga or bar classes and counting that as your strength training, you're missing one of the most important adaptations your body needs. And it's not flexibility, it's not core strength, it's not balance. Today I'm gonna show you the specific reason these modalities just stop building muscle within weeks, why that matters more as you age, and the one type of training that no other modality can replace. You're also gonna learn what a nine-month study of Pilates found when researchers measured muscle growth. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds a hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, Philip Pape, and here is the situation. I talk to women every week who tell me that they are doing strength training. And then when I ask what that looks like, they say, Oh, I'm doing Pilates three times a week, or I'm doing hot yoga, or I'm doing this bar class and some resistance ban work at home. And they're frustrated because despite consistently showing up to these classes, sometimes for years, their body composition hasn't really changed. They're not building the strength or muscle they expected. They don't feel noticeably stronger. Or if they did, it was for a few weeks, maybe a few months, and then it stopped. And if they're over 40 or in perimenopause, they might be watching their muscle and bone density go the opposite direction despite all of that effort. And, you know, I'll be honest, these activities are decent. They have real evidence-backed benefits. And I'm gonna tell you what they are later in this episode because I don't want to just trash on every mode of movement. I think movement is great. But I also owe you the honest answer on what the research says about building and preserving muscle and bone, both are important, and these modalities just do not meet that threshold. They don't. And it's not because they're bad. I have no judgment against them in general. I'm specifically talking about strength and muscle. These modalities are designed for something that is not that. So if that's what your goal is to get stronger to build muscle to improve your body composition, we're gonna have to do something more effective. Then I want you to stick around to the end because I'm going to share a three-question audit that you can run for yourself on any workout. It takes 10 seconds to know whether it qualifies as what I'll call real strength training. And you might be surprised by the answer, so stick around for that. So today you're gonna learn the two biological requirements that any exercise has to meet to build muscle, why your body stops adapting to Pilates and yoga within just a few weeks, and the specific data from studies on what happens to muscle and bone when you rely on these modalities versus actual progressive resistance training, especially as we age, especially over 40. So let's just jump right into it and talk about the conventional wisdom and why it sounds right.

What every modality gets right at first

Philip Pape 3:00

I always like to start there because there's a lot of truth in these things, and then we can break it apart from there. So if you hear, you know, do Pilates for strength, I know Pilates are very popular right now, or yoga can build muscle, or bar can sculpt and tone you. There is a grain of truth in all of it because these activities use your muscles. You feel them working. They are a little bit more low than not doing those activities. You might even be sore the next day, especially when you first start. And then there's always the marketing aspect with the wording, like Pilates sculpts long, lean muscles or yoga builds functional strength, right? You've heard it all. For someone who was previously sedentary, any of these, and let's just let the cat out of the bag, any form of exercise whatsoever practically, is going to produce noticeable improvements in the first few weeks. You are gonna get stronger functionally. Guess what? Riding a bike when you were previously sedentary is also gonna build some muscle initially. You're gonna feel more capable from doing these things as well. You might really enjoy the classes, you might feel like you are accomplishing something really powerful, and you are in some sense. Does that translate to ultimately what you want to get out of it? Well, the problem is what happens after that honeymoon period, after those first few weeks. And more importantly, the problem is not it's what's not happening in your body, especially if you're older, especially if you're perimenopause or post-menopause. If your goal is to build or maintain muscle mass and your bone density, that is why I'm calling out these particular populations who we work a lot with with our coaching, and I know how important that is. Avoiding osteoporosis,

Two requirements for muscle growth

Philip Pape 4:45

avoiding sarcopenia. Very, very important. So let me define what's actually required for your muscles to grow. There's two non-negotiable requirements, two requirements, just to simplify it. Number one is sufficient mechanical tension on the muscle. This means the muscle has to be loaded heavily enough that the fibers experience real force, right? Strength is simply the application of force, the production of force. This is what activates the signaling pathways that your body is so capable of activating, especially what's called the mTOR pathway. We're not going to go into details, but that tells your body to build new muscle protein when combined with eating protein, we build muscle. So mechanical tension is, I'll say, the number one, if the only principle we care about on the muscle. Number two, what else is required for muscle to grow is proximity to failure. Now, this is kind of a proxy of number one in a way, because getting proximity to failure leads to mechanical tension. So it's almost like secondary, but it's very important because the set that you're doing, the set of whatever it is, let's say you're doing a bench press, it has to be hard enough that you're within a few reps of the point where you physically cannot do another rep with good form. We've seen multiple studies that back this up. There was a 2022 study that showed that low load training not taking a failure produced far less hypertrophy, hypertrophy is muscle growth, than the same training taken to failure. There was a 2024 meta-aggression that confirmed the dose response relationship as well. Now it was just a couple of years ago. Again, the closer your sets are to failure, the more muscle you build. And of course, that's because it is giving you, number one, sufficient mechanical

Proximity to failure in group fitness classes

Philip Pape 6:30

tension. And that's actually all it comes down to. All the other talk about volume and intensity and everything else are to affect that outcome. Now, think about a Pilates class. Think about a flow in yoga, right? The stretching flow, the position flow. Think about a bar session if you're familiar with these. Are you approaching muscular failure on any set? Honestly. Honestly, are you? And if it's one set, great, but are you doing it on a consistent basis? There's usually an instructor, and the instructor's pacing the group. The choreography dictates when you stop and the movements dictate what you're doing. It's not the training to proximity to failure with your muscles like you would if you were doing reps on your own with free weights or machine or something like that. The cultural emphasis in these things is more on the control, on the flow, on the connection, on the pace, on sometimes the aerobic aspect of it as well. Um, there's often music involved, sometimes, sometimes not. It's not about, hey, let's

The limits of a Pilates reformer spring

Philip Pape 7:30

get really close to failure to do something really hard where you want to quit and putting enough tension on your muscles. There might be a different type of discomfort, right? A different type of discomfort like sweating, soreness, your heart rate, but not the mechanical tension. The mechanical tension is not there. A Pilates reformer works with springs that follow something called Hooke's law. I'm gonna throw in some engineering for you or physics here. The typical working resistance is five to 30 kilograms per exercise. And the maximum resistance tops out around 50 to 130 kilograms, and it depends on the brand and the position of the reformer. So for your lower body, that ceiling gets reached really fast, right? Because those are much bigger muscles. For comparison, a moderately trained woman might squat 135 pounds, which converted to kilograms is 61 kilograms, and then she's adding weight every few weeks. So she quickly blows past what the reformer could possibly give her, probably within a few weeks, maybe a few months, again, depending on your starting point. And that's it. And the reformer can't keep up anymore. And that's why we talk about the first few weeks as being not as important, because of course anything can cause growth when you're starting from a very weak baseline. And then beyond that, you're not going to get it anymore. You might maintain something, maybe, but that's not what we're trying to do. We're not trying to maintain,

Progressive overload and the repeated bout effect

Philip Pape 9:00

we're trying to build muscle and increase bone density and maintain bone density as well. So that brings us to progressive overload, which is the principle that ties all this together. Your body is really good at adapting. It's like a machine when it comes to adaptation. When your body encounters a stimulus, it adapts to handle that stimulus, and then it needs a bigger stimulus to keep adapting. That is built into our biology. It is why you're not sore after your third week of the same Pilates routine or of the same squat on Monday. Your body adapts. The signal is weakened, and now you're only maintaining. Now, the difference with the squat and the Pilates is the squat keeps going up. The Pilates maxes out. You see the difference. And the research on this is clear as well. It's called the repeated bout effect. A single bout of exercise provides substantial protection against muscle damage from subsequent identical bouts. And so at the molecular level, the number of genes that are activated by the same workout, right? Because that's adaptation, drops significantly within just three weeks. And then your body literally stops responding at the cellular level, especially when the load doesn't go up. So on one hand, there's a benefit to this in that you won't get super sore. On the other hand, it's a disadvantage if you're not actually increasing the load. You're not going to adapt any further. And this is exactly where Pilates, yoga, and bar and things like it hit a wall. And even something like CrossFit, if you're not actually progressively overloading the strength component, let alone the other aspects of CrossFit that kind of get in the way. We don't have to go into that. Whereas with a barbell or dumbbells or a machine, a cable machine, really a lot of options. It doesn't have to be just barbells, you actually solve this problem very elegantly. This is why I love strength training, because it's just a very efficient, elegant, straightforward solution to the problem. What do you do? You add two and a half pounds or five pounds or

How Pilates, yoga, and barre plateau quickly

Philip Pape 11:00

10 pounds, whatever makes sense, whether it's dumbbells or barbells, you add some weight. Small incremental increases that keep the stimulus ahead of the adaptation. I actually found I was actually looking up if there are official recommendations, and actually the ACSM recommends two to 10% load increases when you can exceed your target reps by one or two. It's an interesting metric. I always just say, look, you're gonna figure it out. It's gonna be probably five to 10%, and it's gonna depend on recovery and depend on how strong you've already gotten. But that's kind of an interesting metric, right? Because it means if you, if your target reps are let's say, let's say eight to 10 reps, and you can get to 11 or 12 reps, then you would go up between two to 10%. Now again, I have different ways of coaching folks. I don't, I actually would rather you increase the weight by default and have the reps come down. And then when the reps fall too far low, you can reset. But that's it's two halves of the same idea. It's progressive overload. Either way, you're increasing the load or the volume in some way over time, and that's how muscle keeps growing for years. And of course, the reason it's growing is what? Go way back to earlier in the episode because of mechanical tension. Now, what does progression look like in Pilates? Well, you go from a medium spring to a heavy spring, and that might be the only jump available for that exercise. Or you can change the lever arm, and that changes the movement pattern entirely. So now you're not even doing the same movement pattern. You can't just incrementally increase in an objective way, like a two and a half or five pound increment. There's no systematic path from week six to week 26 with the load increases by small predictable amounts. I'm sorry, it just doesn't work. Yoga, how about yoga? Well, your body is the load there. This is more like uh body weight or calisthenics in a way, and your body weight doesn't change, right? Unless you want to eat a bunch of food and become fatter to make it harder on yourself. That's not the way we do things. You can progress from, you know, to harder poses, but the jump from like a standard plank to one arm variation is a actually a massive jump. There's no middle ground. It's like going from squatting 95 to squatting 225. The point is it's not objectively incrementally loadable. And then when you think of bar, you've got lightweight, you've got high reps, you've got these pulsing movements, the load

Volume-hypertrophy data and diminishing returns

Philip Pape 13:15

is fixed, it's some very, very lightweights, like two to five pounds. Once your muscles are used to that, and that happens in a few weeks, the stimulus is gone. You're just having fun at that point, getting a sweat on, having some fun exercise with the ladies, and that's it. And again, I'm not trying to be dismissive about it, but it you're you're training muscular endurance, you're not training strength, you're not getting muscle growth out of these things. And I'm saying all this with love because I want you guys to get what you want. And these these these activities fit under to me, they fit more in cardio, the cardio slash fun category. They don't fit into the strength training and muscle building category. Um, and here's a little nerdy fact. There was a 2024 meta-aggression of 67 studies over 2,000 subjects, and they found that the volume hypertrophy relationship follows a square root function. Stick with me, even if you know what I'm talking about, stick with me. It means the more reps that you pile on at the same load, the less additional growth you get per rep. This is why we don't advocate for super high reps. We advocate for a moderate rep range, but going up in weight. Now, that rep range is still pretty wide, anything from one rep to say 20, 25, even 30 reps. But with something like, again, yoga or bar or Pilates, you know, if if you were even to quantify it as reps, you would have to just get more and more and more reps to try to get close to that mechanical tension. And eventually it just becomes impossible. Very quickly, it becomes impossible to do that, let alone being not objectively incrementable, incrementally loadable. All right. So you're hearing this and thinking, okay, Philip, I get it. I need to lift heavy. And that's where the word heavy comes into play here. It's not too

Getting started with progressive resistance training

Philip Pape 14:55

heavy for you, it's simply heavy enough to be proximal to failure to cause mechanical tension so you can build muscle and strength. How do you do it though? What program do you do it? How do you set up your nutrition, your recovery, your energy, your sleep to support it? That is what Eat More Lift Heavy is designed to solve. We just launched this week, yesterday, March 30th, as this episode comes out. It is now open to the public. It is my 26 week, so that's six months, coached program. We have another coach in the group, Coach Carol, where we take you through three phases. Stop guessing, where you build awareness, you set your baseline, eat more lift heavy, where you execute with real-time coaching adjustments, just what we're talking about today. And then trust yourself where you build the skills to manage your own physique independently. And you learn the skills week by week and they build on each other. You get a coach-assigned training program from day one. It is matched to your equipment, your schedule, your experience level. So, yes, if you're coming from yoga or bar or Pilates, we are gonna help you get to where you need to be. And of course, super important, a nutrition strategy, live coaching calls, community support, all of that for accountability. And accountability itself is super, super important. And very few, if anybody else at this price point offers both the training and nutrition coaching together in this uh skill building approach. So if this episode is making you think about your training approach and how to get the help that you need, go to eatmore liftheavy.com. That is eatmore liftheavy.com. Link is in the show notes. It is out now and people are loving it. Go to eatmoreliftheavy.com.

Sarcopenia risk from perimenopause to menopause

Philip Pape 16:30

Okay, so everything I've said so far applies to everyone. I'll be honest, it applies to everyone. The principles are the same. But I want to spend a few minutes on why this matters even more with age, especially if you're over 40, especially if you're a woman entering or in the middle of perimenopause or menopause. And there's really important data that I want to share. A 2021 study found that sarcopenia, the prevalence of sarcopenia, which is what we we call clinically significant muscle loss and function, the loss of function and muscle with age, it jumps from about 3% in early perimenopause to roughly 30% in late perimenopause. And that's a tenfold increase in a window of just a few years. And then after menopause, the muscle mass declines more linearly, about 0.6% a year. And then bone loss accelerates 1.5% to 2.5% a year during the first decade after menopause. And the key reason for this is declining estradiol, which removes a key anabolic signal because estradiol stimulates muscle satellite cell proliferation, it limits the degradation of your protein, and it inhibits inflammatory signals that break down muscle. So, all this to say that when that hormonal protection drops, your muscles need more mechanical stimulus to get the same growth response, not less. And ladies, your ability to grow muscle is still the same. I want you to know that. Your ability and percentage growth of muscle potential as you get older is still the same till you're pretty much till your 90s, is what we've discovered. So your ability to build muscle is still there. You just need to have the right stimulus. And then for bone density, which is the other important piece, especially for women after 40, there's something called the mechanostat theory. This is related to new bone formation. New bone formation requires mechanical strain that exceeds 1500 micro strain. And you

Bone density, the LIFTMOR trial, and lifting heavy

Philip Pape 18:30

don't have to measure that. I don't even know how to measure that. But heavy squats, deadlifts, and even impact exercises, so jumping type exercises, generate those strains. And I've learned from talking to some really good experts in this area that heavy lifting above about 80% of your max, of your one rep max, or 85%, is what you need to maintain your bone density. But if you want to reverse osteoporosis, reverse and build new bone because you've lost a lot, you also need some impact exercises on top of that. So the matte Pilates, the gentle logo, the light bar, they don't produce that strain. That's what I'm getting at. And then aging bone becomes less mechanically sensitive, and the threshold rises when people are most vulnerable to osteoporosis. And there was a study called the Liftmore trial. I love that name, lift more without a knee, lift more. Postmenopausal women with low bone density did two 30-minute sessions a week of supervised lifting at greater than 85% of their one rep max. Deadlifts, squats, overhead press. Three of my favorites. They did it for eight months, and the result was pretty staggering that lumbar spine bone mineral density improved 2.9% versus a 1.2% decline in the low intensity control group. So that's a 4% difference. That's massive. And not only massive, you heard what I just said. Bone density went up in the training group in the high intense group, you know, high load group, and it actually went down in the other group, despite them actually training, but it was a low intensity. That's huge. There were no fractures, there were no injuries, the compliance was over 87%. Now, compare that to a 2021 meta-analysis of 11 studies that looked at Pilates and yoga for bone density in adult women, and those studies found no significant effect on bone density compared to controls. The what they call pooled effect size was 0.07 and the confidence interval crossed zero. Again, no significant effect on bone density. I'm not surprised by that, but it's just good to know that there are studies that further back this up. So I'm gonna say this differently. I'm gonna summarize this differently. Eight months of heavy lifting improved bone density by nearly 3%. Pilates and yoga combined showed no effect. That's it. That's the qualitative difference if you care about building bone versus watching it wear away. Okay, so now what is the fix? I told you it would be deceptively simple. That's

Do THIS to build strength and muscle over 40

Philip Pape 21:06

the mission of this podcast. Even though I have a tendency to ramble sometimes, the fix is simple. If you want to build and maintain muscle mass and bone density, you need progressive resistance training with external loading. That could be barbells, dumbbells, cable machines, plate-loaded machines, anything where you can add weight in some way, resistance in some way, in small increments over time, training at least twice per week, ideally three or more, targeting all major muscle groups, and working at loads where your sets end within about three reps shy of failure. That's it. That's in one paragraph what the fix is. So it's not complicated, it's not sexy, it's not 30 days to a new you, it's not a challenge. It's just showing up, lifting heavy things, adding a little weight when you can, and doing that consistently for months and years. Now, going back to the ACSM, they came out with brand new resistance training guidelines. Their first update in 17 years, based on 137 systematic. Reviews of over 30,000 participants, and here's what they recommend they recommend at least 60 to 85% of your one rep max for strength and hypertrophy development. And that's consistent with what I've talked about before. When we talked about strength versus hypertrophy, you need at least 30% for hypertrophy and 60% for strength. So if you want both, you've got to be above 60%. And if you want the bone density benefit, you've got to be above about 80 or 85% sometimes. Not all the time, but a lot of the time. Now, what about Pilates, yoga, and bar? You don't have to quit them. I wouldn't ask you to do that. They actually excel at some things that resistance training can't. So for example, Pilates can be effective for low back pain. Now, I'm not saying that deadlifts are not also effective for low back pain because they can be as well, believe it or not. But Pilates, interestingly, has been helpful for that and knee osteoparthritis pain and range of motion and core stability, appropriate reception, motor control, all of these things. And once you take this with a grain of salt, too, because all of the do you, all of you who are strength training and not doing Pilates or yoga, whatever else, probably are also getting all these benefits as well. But I'm just wanted to point out some of the benefits these have in isolation. Yoga, of course, has been around forever, many, many years. It's ancient and has a lot of evidence for reducing stress, anxiety, and depression. It can reduce stress and mood, you know, help with mood. It's one of the most effective well-being interventions for so many people. And I know so many people love it. There's many people in our group that teach it, that do it, that love it. And I'm all for that if that's for you. I think yoga is great. I've done yoga before. I love many aspects of it, both for relaxation and for stretching and things like that. So there's definitely independent benefits of these things. And then the group fitness in general provides something. And that is, for a lot of people, it keeps them adherent to their program. And there's research to back this up. And the relatedness aspect, higher attendance, long-term consistency versus training alone, the social support, the accountability, the enjoyment is very, very helpful. So you have to use these things for what they're good at, like yoga for the recovery and stress, Pilates for maybe some rehab or pain management, bar and group for the social motivation. But they're complements to strength training. They're not replacements for strength training. All right, before we wrap up, remember I promised you a three-question audit you can use on any workout to know instantly whether it counts as real strength training. But if this episode is shifting how you think about your training, I ask you to do one thing. Text this to a friend

Bonus: 3-question strength training audit

Philip Pape 24:30

who's been doing Pilates or yoga and calling it strength training and tell them that I told you to send it if they're gonna get mad at you. You might help them find out a new way to protect their muscle and bone for decades, the way we do it. And if you realize that you need a structured plan to start lifting, go to eatmoreliftheavy.com and learn about what we offer. 26 weeks of weeks of coach training and nutrition with a specific skill building approach. That's eatmoreliftheavy.com. All right, here's how you can evaluate any work workout in 10 seconds to see if it's actually strength training. Question one, did the load go up since the last time you did the workout? Even a little, even two pounds, even one pound. If the answer is no and it's been no for weeks, you've plateaued, it is not strength training. Question two, did any set end within three reps of the point where you physically couldn't complete another set within three reps shy of failure? If you finished every set feeling like you had five, seven, ten or more reps in you, no, stimulus wasn't strong enough. Question three, can you add more weight next time? In other words, does the exercise allow you to do so? Not a harder variation, not more reps. Can you actually add weight to the thing you're doing? If the equipment or the movement pattern you're doing has a ceiling on load that doesn't let you do that, you've outgrown it. It's not a good tool for the job. So if you answered no to two or three of these, what you're doing might be really good for exercise, if you want to call it that, but it's not gonna build muscle or strength. And I know that is what you want to change. All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, the exercise that protects your muscles and bones for the next 30 years isn't the one that is the most fun or that you enjoy doing necessarily. It's the one that gets progressively heavier over time, and it is called training. Strength training to be exact. I'm Philip Hape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.